Program Helps Kids Head off Violence

Article excerpt

Hope is on the way for city schools where violence is not in
the curriculum but is on the daily agenda. It's an antidote
administered by the students themselves, a program called School
Conflict Resolution Experts (SCORE).

It was initiated in Massachusetts, whose attorney general, L.
Scott Harshbarger, was in Washington last week to collect a
$100,000 grant from the Ford Foundation and the John F. Kennedy
School of Government to tell the rest of the country about it.

A pilot program of conflict resolution, coordinated by
mediation expert Kathy Grant, was in place when Harshbarger came
into office, and he greatly expanded it. Today, across
Massachusetts mediators are in 26 high schools; 300 students have
been trained in skills they never heard of, like listening - and
to both sides of a story - talking instead of fighting, and
persuading peers that it's cool to walk away from somebody you
can't stand. Harshbarger's office claimed 2,500 successes.

Conflict resolution proved its worth in December 1992, when
Medford High School boiled over with racial strife. The question
was whether the school would have to be closed. Harshbarger called
the police chief and the superintendent of schools and volunteered
his services. They accepted. Coordinator Grant raced to the site,
having garnered mediators from her reserve list. They worked all
weekend.

The students were requested to name their leaders. Mediators
insisted on diverse groups, with every ethnic group and both sexes
represented.

"They were told to sit down with both sides and work out a
solution agreeable to both sides," Harshbarger recalled. "Mediators
are told not to decide who's right and who's wrong but to find out
why the two sides feel the way they do about each other. Trace down
the rumor that may have set them at each other's throats in the
first place."

Student mediators are chosen with an eye to leadership
qualities, not academic accomplishment - "You don't look for
National Merit scholars," Harshbarger explains.

Gang leaders are considered excellent material because they
have sway over their membership and remove any suspicion that only
finks and nerds need apply. …